Describing dishes
How to get on
Here you are going to learn the vocabulary that you can use when describing dishes.
- At first read the introduction and get to know the two meanings of the word "dish".
- Think about the sayings, then read the text about tastes and learn the new vocabulary.
- You can improve your knowledge of dishes and cooking verbs in the Picture dictionary.
- You can look up the meanings of the words in Estonian-English dictionary and hear the pronunciation of the words by clicking on the English word.
- Finally you can do the PRACTICE EXERCISES which include CROSSWORDS, VIDEO and lots of ADDITIONAL READING.
Do you know
the meaning of the word "dish"? It can be used in two different ways.
Click on the button below to check your answer:
THERE ARE LOTS OF DIFFERENT SAYINGS ABOUT TASTE
- Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
- Taste cannot be controlled by law.
- Fish, to taste right must swim three times - in water, in butter and in wine.
- One man's meat is another man's poison
- A spoon doesn't know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool a taste of wisdom.
Tastes
When you have to describe a dish you need to know the adjectives that describe the taste of the dish. Everyone has got his favourite dishes, but there are lots of words that you can use to talk about that.
Read the following text about TASTES and try to guess the meanings of the words. After that you can check the meanings by clicking on the button below.
Humans detect taste with taste receptor cells. These are clustered in taste buds. People sometimes feel tastes differently and so they have different favourities Some people like sweet things, others salty. When you like the food you can say it is: delicious, good or excellent. Some food can be sweet like candies, ice-cream, chocolate, cookies or cakes. Fruit is mainly juicy, especially when it is ripe and fresh. But sometimes it is unripe and then it can be sour and taugh. Tender is used to describe a meat or vegetable dish when it is easy to cut or chew. Spicy or hot is used when the dish is strongly flavoured with spices. Exotic can be any national dish that you have never tried before.
Meat can be sometimes a bit raw or underdone, it means that it is cooked only a little. Some people like it so. That kind of meat can sometimes be taugh if it isn't done well. If it is cooked a little more we can call it slightly underdone or medium cooked and if more then it's well-done.
Some things taste sour like lemons or limes and some taste bitter like grapefruits, but they are all very juicy.
When you like the food and it tastes well you can call it tasty as well and when it is pleasantly and lightly flavoured with herbs and salt we call it savoury.
Sometimes we don't like the food and there can be different reasons for that. When you have put too much salt it is too salty. Then there is too much fat it is greasy. When the food is too greasy it may aslo be stodgy – it means it is too heavy and hard to digest.When it's not too spicy we call it mild and that's a positive opinion, but when there is no taste at all we call it bland and that means that we don't like it because it is too tasteless.Sometimes it may happen that we eat something that is stale, which means that it isn't fresh any more or it's"best-before" is over. If we are lucky we feel only a strange after-taste, but it may happen that we get sick as well and cannot eat anything for a while.
So I hope that the dishes that you eat are just done to turn which means they are just perfect and taste delicious. But be careful eating salty peanuts, pistachio nuts or crisps, because they are terribly more-ish. that means you want to eat them more and more and you can't stop it.